


English or Japanese

by koonutkalifee



Series: Subjects [2]
Category: D.Gray-man
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Teachers AU, it's a continuation, rated for language and implied sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-03
Updated: 2016-01-03
Packaged: 2018-05-11 07:43:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5619073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/koonutkalifee/pseuds/koonutkalifee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been seventeen years since they met, eight since they started working together and six since they'd moved in together.</p><p>Their relationship hasn't changed much, but it works for them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	English or Japanese

**Author's Note:**

> so this is a continuation of History and Maths and you should probably read that first. actually, this won't really make sense unless you do.

Kanda wasn’t really sure how he’d fallen in love with Allen.

Some days he questioned _if_ he had fallen in love with Allen. Or maybe he was just pretending he questioned it. He was almost as good at lying to himself and everyone else as Allen was, and he did it nearly as frequently.

He guessed that it was somewhere between the age of nineteen and twenty-two. It hadn’t been like they were in regular contact. Heck, both of them would firmly insist there was no contact at all, and that the times they ran into each other were just coincidences.

They’d both been travelling alone, after all. They’d probably just been lonely, and bored, and in need of company.

Not that they considered each other good company. Or even company at all. They were just people who happened to be acquainted and happened to have guardians who knew each other.

Or so he told himself.

It wasn’t like he thought about it often; he was too busy teaching maths to brats in England and trying to survive his friendship with Lavi to reminisce on the past too much. But when he was sufficiently tipsy and had been coaxed by Lenalee, he would think about the few years he and Allen had spent wandering, occasionally crossing paths.

 

“Fuck off, shit-for-brains Kanda!” Allen yelled. One day he was going to stop yelling at Kanda in front of his students. One day.

“Like hell I will, you shitty beansprout!” Kanda yelled back.

Or not.

The two stood fuming at each other in the middle of the corridor. Somehow, to the amazement of their students, they always managed to pick their fights in places void of other adults, and finish their arguing before someone could be called by the yelling.

“What are they saying?”

“Who knows.”

Mumbles of students bounced around the clusters of people.

“Can we use translate? Google the words?”

“That won’t work, Japanese has a different alphabet to English.”

“We don’t even know they’re speaking Japanese.”

“They are.”

Kanda’s hand twitched towards his left hip and Allen sneered at him and stalked past. Kanda tossed his head and left too.

“What, can you understand them?”

“Do you speak Japanese?”

“What are they saying?”

The words that came out of the girl’s mouth delighted the other students, though none of them could face Mr Walker or Mr Kanda for a while.

 

Allen had met Lavi when he was twenty-four, just after starting working at Black Order Secondary School.

“I’m the librarian. You can call me Lavi.”

“Allen Walker.”

“Say, I heard you got in a fight with Yuu earlier.”

“Yeah.”

It had been an odd way to start a first conversation with someone, but Allen was used to weird and so Lavi hadn’t unnerved him.

“Oh?”

“What is it?”

Or maybe he had. Allen wasn’t used to people being more observant than him, though that was his own fault for only keeping company with himself.

“You know who Yuu is.”

“Kanda Yuu?”

“And you know which way round his names go! That’s weird.”

“Is it.”

Allen laughed falsely and Lavi laughed falsely too. The librarian was taller than Allen, but then so was Lenalee. And everyone.

“Kanda doesn’t let most people know his name.”

“He doesn’t let anybody call him by his name.”

Lavi had clearly figured out that Allen and Kanda knew each other but there was no way he could know who they were to each other – like Kanda would ever let _that_ slip – and so Allen technically had the same amount of information as Lavi.

“Well, it’s not like he lets me use his name.”

Allen winced at the thought of trying to call Kanda _Yuu_ without permission and decided it wouldn’t be worth the trouble.

He also decided he liked Lavi. Anyone mad enough to deliberately piss off Kanda was worth liking, as far as he was concerned.

 

“I’m going on a school trip for four nights, Kanda. Stop complaining. I do this every year.”

Kanda refused to admit he was sulking over something as trivial as Allen going away for five days, but he definitely was.

“I’m not complaining, you shitty beansprout.”

Half of the time Kanda lost track of whichever language they were speaking in. It was usually English or Japanese but often they ended up switching halfway through sentences.

“Well, whatever. I’ll be back soon.”

Neither of them would ever admit it but they didn’t like sleeping apart. They both had shocking sleeping habits and having someone around to bully them into going to bed on time was a surprisingly effective way of getting them to sleep.

Until they got competitive and tried to see who could stay awake the longest. Not that they were so childish that they’d still try that. In term times at least.

Nightmares were also easier to deal with.

Kanda tightened his hold around Allen’s waist and Allen let it go because he’d tightened his arm across Kanda’s chest.

 

“What did they say that time?”

“Mr Kanda called Mr Walker a shitty runt and Mr Walker said that Mr Kanda should stop fucking harassing him and piss off back to the maths block.”

The girl pushed her glasses up her nose. She was paraphrasing, as was always necessary when it came to translating two totally unrelated languages, but also because the language they had used had been almost inappropriately informal and she wasn’t sure she wanted to reveal the exact words the two had used. It had seemed almost routine. It had seemed too intimate for her to announce.

The students around her fluttered and gasped and giggled, and then they left.

 

Kanda had been eighteen the first time he met someone that looked dead.

The boy in front of him was short and had a scar on his face, and that pissed him off. Most things pissed him off.

What really pissed him off was the fact that the boy – who was shorter than he had any right to be and looked completely fucking helpless – was dead.

He’d seen dead people before. He knew what their eyes looked like, how they stared glassily, how the soul that was supposed to be in there just wasn’t anymore.

Or maybe it was just buried too far down for Kanda to see, which pissed him off even more.

Or maybe Kanda wasn’t looking properly.

The boy punched him square in the eye, the scrawny arm of his stronger than it looked. Kanda punched forwards and slammed the heel of his palm into the boy’s mouth. He wasn’t sure why they were fighting – he didn’t care enough to remember thirty seconds back – but he did remember that the boy in front of him was dead, or near enough.

Had been dead.

Now he just looked pissed off.

The expression lasted a fraction of a second and the arrogance in his eyes rather predictably pissed Kanda off but it was enough for him to know that the boy wasn’t as dead as he was pretending.

And then he smiled.

“I’m Allen Walker,” he said, and Kanda glared down at him, unimpressed. Walker looked like he meant the smile but then he also looked like the sort of person who knew that he looked like he meant that smile. “You are?”

“Kanda,” he spat.

Fucking not-dead people.

 

Allen wasn’t sure how he was supposed to sleep.

“Oi, Allen. Switch off the light already.”

He was sharing a room with Lavi. They were in Germany. It was a yearly thing.

“Oh. Yeah, sure, sorry.”

Allen flicked off the light and climbed into bed. There was a little light leaking through the gaps around the edges of the curtains and Allen stared at it resolutely. He wasn’t afraid of the dark.

“Allen.”

“What is it, Lavi?”

Lavi knew. It would be pretty difficult for him not to know. And he was so much more observant than any normal person ever could be, anyway.

“You can share my bed if you’re gonna have nightmares sleeping alone.”

Allen threw the nearest thing he could grab, which was a shoe (a heavy shoe) in the direction of his voice. It hit him with pinpoint accuracy.

“Ow!”

“Fuck off, Lavi.”

“I’m serious.” Allen knew he was. He just didn’t appreciate the teasing. He really didn’t like trying to sleep on his own.

Without Kanda.

It was their one compromise. The one time they allowed themselves to act like an actual couple. The only time they ever felt the urge to act like a couple.

“Thanks Lavi, but I’ll pass.”

“Only willing when it comes to Yuu, huh?”

“Shoes come in pairs, Lavi.”

There was silence for a minute. They’d never actually talked about Allen and Kanda’s relationship. Allen didn’t want to and Lavi had figured enough of it out anyway.

“Try and get some sleep, Allen.”

Allen woke himself up by flinging an arm over a chest that wasn’t there and drawing in a breath that he was supposed to expel yelling _Kanda_.

Of course Kanda wasn’t there. And that was fine, because Kanda was a sixteen hour coach ride away and perfectly safe.

 

“Why did you become a teacher, Kanda?”

Kanda shrugged. Had it been anyone other than Lenalee he would have told them to fuck off but Lenalee was, for whatever reasons, more precious to him than most.

“I’m not sure.”

Lavi wouldn’t ask and Allen would figure it out on his own. Lenalee always asked directly.

“Probably because of Tiedoll.”

Tiedoll had been a teacher. An art teacher. Kanda couldn’t draw for shit but he could do maths. And he kind of enjoyed it.

“I see.”

Lenalee knew that Kanda had been fourteen when Tiedoll had taken him in and that Tiedoll had died when he had been nineteen. She knew that Kanda had loved him, as much as Kanda could love anything, and that when he died Kanda completely disappeared for three months.

“He was a teacher. He taught classes for a few months when we stayed somewhere long enough. He was better at it than I am. He wanted me to do something fulfilling. I guess this is fulfilling.”

Kanda wasn’t going to offer any more than that but that was more than he’d ever offered anyone about Tiedoll.

“And Tiedoll knew Komui, so you applied to work here.”

Kanda offered her a softened version of a scowl, which essentially translated to a sad sort of smile, and Lenalee tapped his arm, which essentially translated to a hug.

 

“Oi, beansprout.”

“It’s Allen.”

“Where are you living right now?”

At 6pm the school was devoid of students, and most of the teachers had left. Kanda and Allen stood in the staffroom, drinking cold coffee and waiting to change everything.

“Nowhere pleasant.”

It was a civilised conversation, as far as theirs went. Neither had threatened to kill the other, so far at least.

“Why?”

“I’m sick of living with the shitty rabbit, and it’s not like we don’t spend most of our free time together anyway.”

“Are you asking me to move in with you?”

Allen was laughing at him and Kanda took a breath. This was probably the most painful thing he’d ever done.

“Essentially, yes.”

“I accept.”

They stood for a few moments in silence, drinking the shitty school coffee. The teasing would start in a minute but for that moment Kanda was content.

“That was pretty lame, Kanda.”

“Shut the fuck up, beansprout.”

Life was peaceful. It was dull, but it was nice.

 

“Mr Kanda said: fucking hell, Walker, I’m done with your shit. And then Mr Walker told Mr Kanda that he was a forgetful louse and that he ought to go die in a furnace painfully. And then he threatened to shave his head in his sleep.”

“Isn’t this a bit of an invasion of their privacy?”

“No way. They’re yelling in public.”

The girl with the glasses didn’t mention that Mr Kanda had hissed at Mr Walker that the only way he’d be able to shave his head in his sleep was if he could let the fuck go of him during the night, which had never happened before.

“Yeah, but they don’t think we know what they’re saying.”

“We don’t, remember? We’re just going by – Oi, you okay?”

The girl shuddered. If she hadn’t been sure before, she was sure now of the exact relationship between Mr Walker and Mr Kanda.

“I’m fine. Sorry.”

She could have lived her whole life without knowing _that_ , thank you very much.

 

“What, you still keep that sword?”

Kanda was cleaning Mugen when Allen got home. Kanda pointed it at him in irritation but it wasn’t like Allen had ever been scared of the thing.

“Obviously.”

It had been a pretty stupid question. Mugen didn’t do much but gather dust those days, but Kanda still kept it in perfect condition, propped in whatever room he happened to be in.

Allen had never actually seen him move it from room to room. It just appeared in whichever room Kanda was in. He’d never admit it, but he was kind of impressed at however Kanda managed it. Kanda, of course, just told him he was being an unobservant twat.

He was picking up the slang at least.

Allen snickered and sprawled on the sofa opposite from Kanda’s chair. Had there been anyone else, anyone apart from Kanda, he would have sat properly, primly. Kanda sometimes wondered where his manners had come from; he’d been a circus brat and then a pupil of _Cross_ , and it wasn’t like he could have learned manners from either of them.

“Shut it.”

“You’re thinking of it too.”

“Well I am now, you dirty-minded runt.”

Kanda slid Mugen back into its sheath and Allen laughed again, harder than before. Kanda’s glares did nothing to stop him. “What? You’re the one who held the fucking thing to my throat while we-”

“Stop talking.” Kanda leant over the back of his chair and propped Mugen against the wall. “That was ten years ago, Walker. Drop it already.”

“My god. We’re old.”

“Shut it.”

“We are. We’re so old, Kanda. You’re older, obviously. And you’ve aged worse than me.”

“You looked like an old man from the start, Walker.”

“Did not!”

“Old man hair.”

“Shut up.”

Kanda allowed a brief flicker of a smile to cross his face as Allen scowled at him.

 

Lenalee had given them a photo album for Christmas one year.

Kanda, rather predictably, hated Christmas. Perhaps more surprisingly, Allen did too. Lenalee knew this, and still gave them the album.

“It’s from me and Lavi,” she had said, smiling cheerfully. Kanda thought that her smile looked slightly too much like Allen’s to be trusted, and Lavi had shaken his head behind her in an _it had nothing to do with me_ fashion. Kanda believed him.

Allen had taken it with the exact same smile that she had given it to them with and started flicking through it cheerfully, laughing at all of the pictures of Kanda.

Kanda had to admit, he wasn’t very good at having his photo taken. He knew, vaguely and with little interest in the fact, that he was attractive, but every single picture he’d ever seen of himself had been. Well. Terrible.

Allen thought it was hilarious, but then Allen was a little shit.

Allen had paused for just a moment too long on a photo of the four of them, taken probably only a year or so after the two had started working at Black Order Secondary School. Lenalee had both Allen and Kanda in a headlock, held still for the picture, and Lavi was draped over Kanda doing a peace sign. Allen was laughing and Kanda was nearly smiling, and both of them remembered having that picture taken.

Lenalee’s smile had been dangerous and Allen had handed her a wrapped box that Kanda had had no idea existed until it had appeared in Allen’s hands. “From Kanda and I,” he had said. “Happy Christmas!”

Lenalee had grabbed them both in an unexpected hug and whispered an apology, and Allen had cried that night. Kanda had stroked circles on his back.

Christmas was Allen’s birthday, after all.

 

“You shitty, small-minded, empty-headed, arrogant fuckwit!” Allen’s insults got less coherent the longer he spends shouting at Kanda, and he knew this.

“Are you alright, beansprout? You’re not making a lot of sense here.” Kanda’s face was as close as it ever got to a smirk outside of their house and Allen’s face matched his perfectly, the exact same expression carved into their faces just inches apart.

“Alright, that’s enough then,” Lavi declared loudly in English, stepping between them and pushing them both back. “Neither of you are supposed to be here anyway. Get lost.”

The two glared at each other for a few more moments and then turned and stalked off with huffs.

“What did they say, what did they say?”

It was a long process, translating this argument, because it had gone on for so long; it was made worse because Lavi had grinned at her the moment the students had started crowding around her.

 _He knows I know_ had been her first thought. She probably ought to talk to him about it.

_So, I’m Japanese and actually understand every single word that Mr Walker and Mr Kanda have said to each other in front of me, and everyone asks me to translate for them. Sorry._

She did not want to have that conversation.

“And then Mr Walker said that Mr Kanda’s hair would probably sell better to old men.”

“What a weird thing to say,” someone managed between their laughs.

“Mr Walker’s insults get worse the longer an argument lasts then?”

“I doubt anyone can last in an argument with Mr Walker for as long as Mr Kanda can though.”

“Yeah, he was brutal to Mr Mikk the other day.”

“What did he say, what did he say?”

The argument – as one sided and short as it had been – was recounted gleefully. Mr Walker didn’t argue so much as tell the other person that they amounted to nothing and never would, and then cheerfully pat their shoulder as he walked past them.

 

“Allen, was Kanda your first friend your own age?”

“We’re not friends.”

“You’ve been living together for the last six years. Answer the question.”

“I had friends my own age. While we travelled we used to stay in the same place for three or four months at a time.”

“But Kanda was the first frie- person that you stayed in touch with who was the same age as you.”

“Yeah.”

Allen handed Lenalee a cup filled with tea and sat down on the sofa, next to her.

“Why?”

“He won’t tell me if you were his.”

“I’m not.”

He wouldn’t really tell Allen either, but there wasn’t much that they could hide from each other. Kanda had had people, long before he’d met Allen. And Allen didn’t ask, because Kanda didn’t want to talk about that.

He laughed a little. “It’s amazing how much we could hurt the other if we wanted to,” he muttered, mostly to himself. Kanda had to know everything, about the circus and Mana and his parents and Cross and every other shitty, shitty thing that had happened to him.

“I don’t think so.”

Lenalee drank her tea. Allen didn’t ask; she’d explain if she felt like it. Lenalee was a lot like him in a lot of ways.

“I don’t think you’ve ever actually hurt each other.”

Allen blinked.

“Lenalee, we do nothing but argue.”

“Have you ever fallen out?”

“We don’t like each other enough to fall out.”

“Six years, Allen. That doesn’t really make sense.”

“I know, Lenalee. I know that.”

“So long as you know it, even if you won’t talk about it.”

They sat for a few minutes, straight-backed and drinking tea, the picture of elegance and civility.

“How did you even become a teacher, Allen?”

“I registered myself as home-schooled and forged my exam results. It was really easy.”

Lenalee drank her tea quietly. It was far too easy to forget that Allen wasn’t really in possession of a moral compass.

 

“What the fuck is this?”

“It’s furniture, Kanda. You put it in a house.”

“I can see that it’s furniture, beansprout. Why is it here?”

“Because we’re moving into this house, and we need furniture.”

Kanda considered stabbing him, but he’d considered that at least nine thousand times in the past eleven years and he’d never actually done so.

“What? I thought I did well. Look, there’s a sofa – ”

“Why do we need seating for more than two people?”

“We have got friends, Kanda, and I’m not going to be the one to tell Lenalee she can’t come over. And look, I got a chair for you so you don’t have to sit next to anyone!”

Kanda was pleased at that, though he’d rather stab himself nine thousand times than admit it. Allen sounded like he knew exactly how pleased Kanda would be, the insufferable prick. “Did you get any other furniture?”

“Of course I did, idiot.”

Kanda stormed through the house. He noted the matching desks in two separate rooms and the Japanese-style bed, which neither of them said anything about but Kanda appreciated the thought. Allen was actually quite good at this, and had done significantly better than he would have.

“Are they offices? What are you, an old man?”

“I’m not working at the kitchen table. What are you, twelve years old?”

“Old man hair.”

“You’re older than me, you piece of shit. And we’ve got proper jobs now, and a mortgage. We need offices. We’re adults.”

Kanda, was he the kind of person to do so, would have started laughing hysterically. Instead he just let out a huff of air from one corner of his mouth and his lips upturned slightly.

“You still look like you did when you were fifteen.”

“Well, you look like you’ve aged a hundred years. It’s the scowling. It’ll give you wrinkles.”

“I’ll still look younger than you, old man hair.”

“Are you saying I looked like I was a hundred years old when I was fifteen? I’ll have you know I was adorable. I still looked twelve.”

“A hundred-year-old twelve-year-old.”

“That doesn’t even make sense, shit-for-brains.”

“Shut up. Aren’t we supposed to have some kind of ceremony when moving in?”

Allen suddenly looked pensive and Kanda realised that neither of them had ever lived anywhere permanent. Should they be toasting? Having sex? Throwing a party? Something else?

“I haven’t a clue,” Allen said. “Don’t newlyweds carry each other over the threshold?”

“You’re not carrying me.”

“So you carry me.”

“No way. You’re so much heavier than you should be because you eat so fucking much. I’ll get drinks.”

They didn’t throw a party, which Lenalee was upset about.

**Author's Note:**

> you know why i'm excited about dgm coming back? i mean apart from the fact that dgm is coming back (*high-pitched screaming*) fanworks. there's gonna be so much new fanwork. i'm so hyped. more fic. more amvs. more art.


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